I was happy to get a heart felt message from my ex in Tokyo today, who read the essay and send me this private message today

Quote:

"WOW... no wonder it's hard for a brilliant guy like you to find good friendship of equals in Thailand: heaven for brain-dead ***** guys."

It's sad but true, I live in a beach side condo with fiber optics directly to my computer; but even after years here, it's hard to find good friends .... people seem to like you only if you show the "muppet" version of yourself, say sweet and fluffy nonsense things like Beavis and Butthead, or talk crazy conspiracy theory.... and live in an mind-numbing under-the-influence-of-alcohol state, which I don't....

I'm generally always busy on projects, either helping others or writing code, and for this past 8 months have been deeply involved in cybersecurity issues, writing thousands of lines of code in both C# and PHP.....

.. and as always, thank you, everyone, who helps make unix.com a solid, highly respected place for unix and linux pros ....

And I THANK YOU to always keep this site as fresh/great as it is always .

Thanks,
R. Singh

Well.. errrr... "thanks".. but honestly, the site could be a lot more modern, and someday we'll completely upgrade the site to something different, I guess; but we use so many plugins that are custom, it would be a major effort to build a new site.

But, we will rebuild someday, keeping all the good info; but providing a more up-to-date user experience.....

Right now, my biggest task has been coming out of semi-retirement to get back into fixing some major cybersecurity problems; which have gone unresolved for 20 years and continue to go unresolved.

.. the good news is that I've made great progress..... and continue to make progress step-by-step ... the "bad news" (maybe) is that I am writing every line of code myself.... and it's a lot of code, LOL

I'm basically an optimistic person, but lately, that's taken some solid hits... You can probably guess why, given my location in North America.

The sad truth, they don't teach basic logic and problem solving in North America. Not until you get to college. It ought to be taught before even basic things like civics, so people know what they're looking at.

I see two problems here.
One, when you get free software, you are the product not the customer. You need to ask yourself "How does this entity make an y money?"
And secondly there is no real oversight or enforceable code of ethics for programmers.